This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Pilot project aims to protect vulnerable restaurant workers

Government initiative launched after labour ministry criticized for failing to prevent workplace abuse.

A spokesperson for Labour Minister Kevin Flynn has confirmed in a statement to the Star that the project to prevent abuse in the restaurant industry would be launched this fall. (RICHARD BRENNAN / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

Ontario’s Ministry of Labour is launching a new initiative to prevent abuse in the restaurant industry, after sustained criticism for failing to hold law-breaking bosses to account, the Star has learned.

The pilot project will bring together employers and labour groups to identify major risks to workers’ rights in the sector, according to ministry documents obtained by the Star. It will be led by the ministry’s corporate risk officer, Sujoy Dey, who spearheaded a similar process to reduce accidents, injuries, and deaths in Ontario mines.

Labour groups have repeatedly identified the restaurant industry as one of the worst for workplace violations, and Star investigations into wage theft across the province — and in particular the — have revealed around one third of stolen entitlements in Ontario are never recovered. Workers have lost out on $28 million over the past six years because the ministry failed to collect the money owed to them, recent research shows.

In a statement to the Star, a Ministry of Labour spokesperson confirmed that the project would launch this fall, and would work with “key stakeholders representing employers and employees in the restaurant sector.”

“The goal of this exercise is to identify and gain better insights into the causative factors that could lead to employment standards contraventions in the restaurant sector,” the statement added.

Article Continued Below

The Ontario government has commissioned an overall review of its employment and labour laws with an eye to providing better protection for precarious workers. In its interim report released last month, the special advisers leading that process said the province faces extensive problems enforcing basic employment standards.

“We conclude that there is a serious problem with enforcement of (Employment Standards Act) provisions,” the report reads. “While most employers likely comply or try to comply with the ESA, we conclude that there are too many people in too many workplaces who do not receive their basic rights.”

The pilot comes as the ministry already appears to be ramping up enforcement: recently, an employer was jailed for a day for failing to pay his workers’ wages — only the sixth time in the past two decades a prison sentence has been imposed. In the first half of this year, there have already been 76 prosecutions imposing significant fines on law-breaking bosses. In 2015, there were fewer than 70 prosecutions and in 2014 there were just eight.

The ministry’s nascent enforcement project will add to those efforts by harnessing “collective wisdom” through workshops to build “controls for high priority risk factors,” the documents seen by the Star say — a strategy similar to the mining sector initiative launched in 2013.

The goal is to figure out ways to predict where workplace violations are most likely to happen and how to prevent them, sources told the Star.

But the new project will have to grapple with complex issues: unlike the mining industry, a heavily regulated sector where most workers belong to a union, restaurant employees are usually low-wage and precarious. One study of Chinese workers in GTA restaurants showed that some 43 per cent were paid less than the provincial minimum wage, currently $11.25. In Toronto, the median hourly wage for the sector is $11.50, and less than 3 per cent of workers are unionized according to municipal data.

It will come too late for workers like Fiorildo Tenace, who is still owed more than $8,000 a year after the ministry ruled that his termination from a Toronto coffee roaster was reprisal for asserting his rights under the Employment Standards Act.

“The policies don’t have bite,” said Tenace, who describes his experience battling for justice as “awful.”

In submissions to the Ministry of Labour on how to protect vulnerable workers, labour groups like the Toronto-based Workers’ Action Centre argue stronger enforcement must go hand in hand with strengthening basic employment laws and strategies like sectoral bargaining. That model, used widely in Europe, sees unions negotiate standards across an industry rather than representing individual workplaces.

“Our society has an interest in ensuring minimum social norms are met for pay and working conditions,” its submission says. “When the system of enforcing minimum employment standards breaks down, basic, socially-accepted standards erode.”

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com